follow your heart

something went wrong

Their confidence in him had always surpassed any confidence he had in himself. People had told him on a few occasions that he would be good at whatever he did and to not worry about the future. He hoped they were right and found a lot of comfort in what they said but he never found what they said to be true. Had they all been wrong? Did they just extrapolate what they saw in a nice likable person beyond the usefulness of likability?  Maybe in the end they just saw what they wanted because they liked him so much and they didn’t recognize the false positive their affections generated. Later in life he wondered what they had all seen in him and wondered why ultimately not everyone saw it because if everyone had seen it, he would have had different opportunities and his life wouldn’t have turned out the way it did. Things would have been different and maybe he would have accomplished whatever it might have been that would have provided that elusive sense of satisfaction he had hoped to achieve. Maybe they were right but something somewhere along the way went wrong. Maybe he went wrong somewhere and he wondered what he might have done wrong. Among the realm of so many decisions where there was no wrong or right about them, maybe there were still right or wrong decisions. He thought maybe beyond the universal truths of everyone’s existence there’s a right or wrong in the kingdom of self.  And maybe he just chose wrong exiling himself, causing himself to be banished from the wealth and treasure of his own kingdom forever leaving him with a longing to return to where he felt at home and complete.

the future

They told him that the new nature interface system was the most advanced nature interface system that had ever been developed in the history of the future but that didn’t really console him in the way the men in the lab coats had intended with their nearly falsetto voice inflections.  What he really wanted was to actually interface with nature on his own without some invented system.  He told them what he wanted and they looked at him as if he was a naive little boy that didn’t know any better and could not appreciate all the advances that the future had to offer. He was a little boy of only 7 years of age but he knew what he wanted even though he couldn’t really explain what it was or why he wanted it. They continued to encourage him to accept what they were saying and they tried just as hard to convince themselves that they were as convincing as they hoped to be with the boy even though that just a particle of doubt made it very apparent to them that they really weren’t that convincing. They chose to disregard the particle and tried even harder to make the premise of their convincing true by talking more and more and pitching their voices higher and higher until they thought that they must be convincing the boy and themselves of what they wanted to convince him of. The boy had stopped listening to what they were saying a long time ago and was only listening to how high their voices had become and watched how exaggerated their expressions and movements were as they talked to him.  Unfortunately, the little boy didn’t have any choice in the matter and his disembodied head was eventually placed inside the nature interface system interfacing with the collection of nerve endings bundled at the base of his brain sending information to his brain that would approximate nearly realistic sensory perceptions of the world. His brain began to flood with new information that hadn’t previously been available to him waking the dormant parts of his brain as they interpreted the data into sensory experiences. He was so overwhelmed by these new experiences that the men in the lab coats began to fade from his consciousness and all that remained within him of their existence was some particle of a notion of something about something that really wasn’t that convincing but he couldn’t really articulate what it was. Meanwhile, the men in lab coats moved on to the next disembodied head nearly convinced that this time they would completely convince the next person that the nature interface system was the best nature interface system that the future had ever made but not quite realizing that the discontent they were trying to dispel in so many people had so little to do with the system itself and mostly to do with their own discontent of the future. They further didn’t fully realize that they were trying to convince themselves that they were convincing about the nature interface system so that they could also convince themselves that they didn’t actually feel the same discontent that everyone else felt about future.

stickman with baggage

the pudding of life

why bother?

potatoes and poetry

What he thought was his fairy godmother sent to grant him splendid wishes and great fortune turned out to be just a potato of the ordinary variety with very little wish granting authority. Still, he got a good haircut out of the whole deal.  The haircut turned out to make his friends jealous who were then mean to him causing him to stay home alone a lot. Staying home alone a lot got him really depressed and he found himself writing very bad and gloomy poetry but he thought it was rather good poetry.  So did many pretentious and self-absorbed college kids who mistook themselves as experienced and enlightened because of the big words they were learning and the self-referential conversations they had in classrooms and among themselves.  They used some of those big words to describe his poetry in attempts to compliment him but when they said things like “vacuous” and “mellifluous” he didn’t know what they were talking about and he didn’t realize that the college kids didn’t either so he just nodded and said thanks.  The college kids’ parents were very impressed with his polite demeanor and the fact that he seemed to know what their kids were talking about so they encouraged their kids to spend more time with him.  The more time he spent with them, the more pressure he felt to write poetry and he continued to produce more and more bad poetry.  The continual pressure from the college kids who were becoming increasingly annoying eventually got to him and he began to miss his old friends and he began to write nostalgic poetry that the college kids did not find cool at all and so they stopped being friends with him. He began to stay home and be alone a lot again but since he was so tired of the college kids, being home alone was comforting and he didn’t get depressed at all.  It gave him time to think and he thought back to that potato and how disappointed he was that it wasn’t his fairy godmother but then he thought some more and was quite amazed by the potato because as he carefully reviewed his experience, he realized it was actually quite an amazing potato.